


About Falling

by BarefootWanderer



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Arguing, Coping Mechanisms, Fallen Angels, Getting Together, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Light Angst, M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Resolved Romantic Tension, Y'all are getting the sexytimes, endgame is high-key sexytimes, flagrant abuse of italics, let Aziraphale say fuck, low-key sexytimes, or lack thereof, what we've got here is a failure to communicate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-25 14:50:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19747939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BarefootWanderer/pseuds/BarefootWanderer
Summary: The transition from "ardently in love with one's enemy" to "spending the rest of your life with someone" is rocky, at best.





	1. Before

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is precautionary, for later chapters

“Of course demons can feel love! What would be the point otherwise?”

“I- I’m sorry?”

“The point of Falling! What would be the point?” Aziraphale shrugged helplessly as Crowley gestured wildly toward nothing in particular, not meeting his eyes. “Exactly! There wouldn’t be one. Walking along, oops! You take a tumble. Things get all spinny, and you’re in a pit, and ‘Oh, my, is the quality of the light different?’ Why would that matter?”

Aziraphale tried once again to interject, but Crowley wasn’t finished. “No, angel, it’s so much worse than that. You wake up on your back, bruised, aching, knowing beyond all doubt that you have been excluded from Her love. You wake up every morning, knowing this. Knowing that you had a thing that was so pure, so transcendently, painfully beautiful as to be beyond _language_ , and it was taken from you. You were taken from it, and you can never have it again.

“And you keep loving. You keep trying, reaching, searching, because you would do anything, anything to get that back. But you won’t. You can’t. Plenty of us give up. I certainly have.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uh, the TV show has me back on my bullshit and this just kind of... fell out? Of my brain? I have two or three more chapters lined up, soooooooo enjoy?


	2. The Night Of

When they made love that evening, after watching a child stop the apocalypse, it was far from transcendent. It wasn’t the first time that one of them had groped outward in the dark, seeking comfort or meaning or a distraction, and found the other. It would be the last time, however that they would move together like this, Aziraphale babbling and bereft of higher thought, Crowley wordless and demanding. Neither of them was eager to face the morning, to watch the sun rise on a brutal world that meant to end them each separately, denied even the comfort of a kindly smile in their final moments.

When they separated, spent and sated, anxiety crept back into the room like music played just out of earshot.

And then, because the world was new again, washed clean in some small way, Aziraphale reached out tentatively through the darkness and humidity and the sticky, heavy smell of fear and took Crowley’s hand. Neither moved, and a few seconds or hours later Aziraphale sighed and shifted as if to move away, but Crowley’s fingers tightened against his. “Don’t leave me, angel.”

Aziraphale turned, luminescing slightly. “Crowley, after all this time, you must know-” He faltered, unsure of himself. “That is, what I mean to say-”

Crowley’s voice was harsh, from exhaustion or exertion or something more. “Not tonight.”

“What?”

“Not tonight, Aziraphale. I can’t do this tonight. Just stay with me.”

“Crowley, if they kill me, or worse kill you-” Crowley snorted. “I’m being serious. If this is the end of all of it, of everything, and I was never brave enough to tell you…”

“You told me. You’ve been telling me for years.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale’s voice was small, quavering, a matchstick in a gale. “But it didn’t mean anything, did it? We’re still here, like- like this.” Crowley could feel him gesturing, could barely make out, on the edges of his vision, the blue white glow of his hand fluttering through the darkness.

The noise that Crowley made was insulted, dissatisfied, petulant as a kitten in a bath. “Glad to know I mean so much to you, angel.”

“Oh, shut up!” Crowley tensed as if he had been slapped. “After all this time, I’m trying to have a moment, and you go and- be yourself about it! You’re incorrigible!”

“It’s in the job-”

“Don’t you dare give me that, not after all this. Your job description went right out the window, just as mine did.” Aziraphale had kept his grip on Crowley’s hand, and now he tapped his thumb against Crowley’s, agitated and anxious. “I’m trying to say something important!”

Crowley covered their joined hands with his own, stilling Aziraphale’s fidgeting. “I know what you’re trying to say.” He could hear the noise Aziraphale’s jaw made as he closed his mouth. “I’m not-” He faltered, took a breath, began again. “I’m not ready to hear it yet.”

“But-”

“Listen.” His voice was low, steadier than it had any right to be, and he fought to get his words out before it cracked. “When they come to drag me away from you, and you know they will, I want something to come back to. Leave this, here, unsaid, so that I have something to live for. I’m so tired, angel, and if- when- I have to fight my way back out of hell, I don’t want to come back to a story that’s already ended.”


	3. Tipping Point

They strode out of the Ritz that evening, muzzy from wine and giddy, light on their feet with sudden relief. Crowley felt he could breathe, really breathe, for the first time in days. Brave on liquor and success, he swung around to face Aziraphale and grabbed the angel by the hands. They stopped moving.

“Talk to me, angel. Tell me what you wanted to say, last night.” Aziraphale blinked, hesitating. “Come on then, I’ve been plying you with liquid courage for the past three hours. No one’s dead, the world’s not ending, we have pulled off a trick of absolutely celestial proportions! Let’s have it, then.”

“Crowley-”

Their eyes met, and Aziraphale gave a tiny, pleading shake of his head.

Crowley turned away and dropped their hands, the lightning in his veins stuttering to a halt. “Alright then. Drive you home?” He heard Aziraphale’s frustrated, beleaguered sigh behind him, but didn’t slow his walk toward the car until the angel had nearly caught up to him.

The drive was made in silence, and to Crowley, the air felt thin, weak like at the top of a mountain. He seemed unable to fill his (admittedly extraneous) lungs properly, felt as if the thing he needed was just out of his reach, as though his chest were too small to hold all the air required to keep him upright.

“Like a lead balloon,” he muttered, and when Aziraphale, barely audible, responded “What was that?” his voice too was thin and breathy.

“Nothing,” grumbled Crowley and took a turn much faster than he had to, just to hear the angel gasp in fear and see him tense. Damned if he wasn’t going to be the only one who didn’t want to be here, staving off panic.

He managed not to look anxious as he stopped the car (‘parked’ being a term too generous for the abrupt cessation of the engine, as if by infernal will, and the angles, improbable and barely geometric, the car made against the street and against reality), and watched as Aziraphale opened the door. He willed himself not to hyperventilate, not to panic at the ravine he sensed widening between them, the chasm whose walls he had been striving to scale since time out of mind (not his mind, but, well…), and of which Aziraphale had never seemed to be aware. He fought to slow his pulse, beating his own body into submission as he longed to do with so many other things in his way, and as such managed to inadvertently stop his own heart when Aziraphale murmured “Come inside?”

“Yeah, alright,” Crowley grunted, hands on the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. What else could he say, after all this time? Everything he had ever wanted was in that bookshop, or would be as soon as the angel walked through the door. As it stood, everything he had ever wanted was currently lingering next to the Bentley, waiting for him to step out. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

Aziraphale held the door for him, as always, and Crowley stepped into a shop that smelled suspiciously of books, of tea and damp wool, of cloves and dust and always, bizarrely, of Ivory Soap, but definitely not of smoke. There was no Bradbury-esque scent of burning paper, no sound of sizzling ink or rupturing wood, no cracking glass, no odor of despair and fear and the type of pain that Crowley had not believed himself capable of feeling, not anymore.

He stilled, and opened his mouth to crack a joke, but couldn’t find one under the sudden rush of relief and frustration that had settled over his mind like new snow, softening edges and dulling sounds. Aziraphale trod past him toward the back, fumbled with a kettle while Crowley stood.

“Come in, sit down.” He didn’t yell, but his voice carried because he meant it to. A full minute later, when Crowley had not moved, he poked his head around a shelf. “Oh, don’t be daft. Must I move you myself?” He emerged and reached for the other man, but that shook Crowley from his reverie, and he stepped away before Aziraphale could grab him by the arm.

“Don’t.” It was exactly as harsh as he meant it to be.

Aziraphale frowned, insulted but far from shocked. “Very well. I’m making tea. Sit. Please.”

Crowley sat, watching Aziraphale go through the motions of making tea, which both of them knew was a desperate stall for time, but the angel was certainly one for keeping up appearances. Crowley deliberately took up far too much space on the sofa, lounging like a drunken dandy, compelled to provoke Aziraphale into something, anything but domestic aplomb.

Aziraphale refused to notice him, as if Crowley were an unruly child begging for attention at the wrong moment, and continued to fuss with mugs and sugar and spoons.

“What am I doing here, Aziraphale?” Crowley growled, fidgeting.

Aziraphale cast a disapproving look over his shoulder, “Throwing yourself about like a- a- a harlot, for one!” He turned back to the counter.

“HAH!” said Crowley, rising. “And when have you ever met a harlot, angel? Spent a lot of time with women of the evening, have you? Patronizing iniquitous establishments? Telling yourself you were there to _save_ somebody? I would bet my wings that-”

“Stop it!” Aziraphale stamped his foot and turned. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that in my own home!”

“What, would you prefer we take this into the street?” Crowley realized that he was yelling, but he could not bring himself to stop. “Put on a display for the neighbors? Have a proper domestic, you and I, shall we? Six _thousand_ years, angel, I’d say it’s time we had a tiff, wouldn’t you?”

“Sit down, you ridiculous creature!” Crowley, startled, closed his mouth and sat. “What did you imagine was going to happen next, hm? After last night? You expect me to try again, after that?”

“Yes!” snarled Crowley. “Yes, I do. I’m sorry that after losing you, and nearly dying, and killing a coworker, and _meeting Satan_ I wasn’t emotionally available at the _single, precise_ moment you decided to talk about your feelings! I’m sorry that I needed a nap, and a drink, and one last evening with the only person in the world I care about before things went absolutely tits-up for the third time in two days, Aziraphale!”

Aziraphale, surprising neither of them, wilted. Crowley fought to maintain the energy he had carried into the room, knowing that if he swallowed it now he would be left with nothing but fear and confusion coating his tongue, gummy and acrid as turpentine. But he gulped, and felt suddenly small, filthy, unworthy of the light he had been striving toward, and that now looked at him with something nauseatingly like pity. He threw himself onto his back, lengthwise against the couch, and covered his face with his hands.

“I should go,” he croaked.

“Please don’t.” The angel’s voice was level, heavy with something Crowley could not identify. “I want you here. That is, if you want to be here.”

“Always, angel. Never wanted to be anywhere else.”

Aziraphale hazarded a joke “Not even heaven?” Crowley didn’t look at him, but could hear by his tone that there were jazz hands involved.

“Not especially. They don’t like me much up there. Too……” he waved a hand aimlessly, indicating himself vaguely.

“Stylish?” offered Aziraphale.

“Yeah, that must be it.” Crowley did not move his hands from his face.

Aziraphale tapped Crowley’s ankle, politely demanding space on the sofa. Crowley wordlessly threw his legs over the back, contorting improbably to keep his head on the armrest.

“Are you, uh, quite comfortable there?”

“Been worse, angel.”

Aziraphale sat, and cleared his throat. “I, um, always wanted you here, too.” Crowley didn’t speak. “I- that is- I very much appreciated your hospitality last night. Nowhere else to go, and all that. I’m sorry if I misinterpreted your intentions. Long day, you know. Long decade, really, and I-”

“You didn’t misinterpret, Aziraphale.”

“Oh.”

“You _interpreted_ perfectly. I just wasn’t expecting it, was all. Not then. Didn’t think I could handle another shock to the system, if you will.” Crowley sat up. “Why last night, anyway? Why just then, after all this time?”

Aziraphale met his eyes. “I only had one thing left to lose, I suppose. Can you really blame me for trying to hold it tighter?”

Crowley laid back and stared at the ceiling, letting the sudden change in elevation rush to his head, coupled with the alcohol and the exhaustion and the blood that pumped at double speed through his veins. It felt like falling. “I suppose I can’t,” he said grudgingly.

Aziraphale, hesitantly, reached an arm behind himself and placed his hand on Crowley’s ankle. “I’m sorry. If that helps at all.”

“Me too.”

Crowley understood falling, understood that after a point there was nothing to do but lie back and let gravity take you. It rarely ended well, but familiarity breeds contempt. It felt like such a _human_ thing to do, falling. Casting oneself off a cliff, or what have you, was dramatic and ridiculous, something out of Euripides. But falling, that was another feeling all together. The compulsion to stand there and just… let go, to tip, was overwhelming at times. To permit himself to be dragged down to earth by whatever primeval forces took a liking to him, well. That had a certain appeal. It had happened before, over and over. He’d been falling in one way or another for as long as he could remember.

Not so with Aziraphale, though. There had been no fall there, no single moment of breathless terror before something hooked Crowley’s heart and clawed it downwards, no sudden stop. He did not have the cracked bones and bewilderment of one who had stuck earth at terminal velocity and then kept going. No, he had stepped, tripped, rolled into whatever this was now, eyes open the whole way.

“Angel?”

“Yes?”

“Kiss me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am drawing things out longer than I have to? Yes  
> Am I having a good time? Absolutely  
> Do I have a playlist queued up that is almost entirely Say Anything? Damn straight


	4. Transcendence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter is the same length as the other three combined, but once it started I had to wait for it to finish, as it were. I feel like this might have gone just a bit off the deep end, so apologies if it doesn't scratch whatever itch you, dear reader, happen to have.

Crowley was still sprawled across the couch, bare-chested now, with Aziraphale tangled untidy against him. Every point of contact, though achingly familiar, warmed him in a way that was new and glorious. He arched his back as Aziraphale’s tongue and hands inscribed prayers into his torso, and then he did something very, very foolish.

“I love you, angel.”

Aziraphale stilled. Crowley groaned and swore, then wriggled on the couch in order to get a better look at the angel perched between his legs.

Aziraphale knelt, transfixed, on the couch just out of Crowley’s reach. His jaw hung slack in something like shock and his eyes were as wide as Crowley had ever seen them. And Aziraphale was _glowing_. They were still for a beat, before Crowley raised a hand to snap in Aziraphale’s face. “Oi, angel. Angel! What are you doing? You look like a blessed Christmas tree.”

He seemed to come to, and looked down at his hands. “Oh my. That’s…new.”

Crowley made a shapeless noise of agreement and righted himself on the sofa, so that he and Aziraphale were face-to-face. “It’s happened before,” he murmured, reaching out to touch Aziraphale’s face but stopping, the distance between their skin a hairsbreadth that might have been a mile for all that either of them could tell. “Just not quite like this”

“Has it?”

He watched Aziraphale watching him, watched the expression on the angel’s face change in response to his own. Watched the fine hairs on his cheek rise in response to whatever energy or magnetism or supernatural force jumped the tiny, untraversable distance between Crowley’s palm and Aziraphale’s face.

“Yeah. You, uh- you glow at night sometimes. Just a bit. When we’re… together. Uh, biblically.”

“Ah. Fucking,” clarified Aziraphale, looking for all the world like he meant to be helpful.

Crowley choked on his own tongue and noticed Aziraphale’s eyes crinkle in amusement before he bent double and tried not to discorporate in shock. “Where the _hell_ did you learn that word?”

“Norway,” supplied Aziraphale. “Fourteenth century? Perhaps a touch earlier?”

“Of course you know,” muttered Crowley to himself, gesturing in something between exasperation and delight. “Of course you know! Why wouldn’t you have an answer to that, of all things?” He sighed and put his head in his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Aziraphale’s hand, shirtsleeve askew, cufflink missing, still radiating light like the rest of him, reach out as if to straighten Crowley’s hair. He seemed to think the better of it and returned his hand to his lap. “Did you mean it?”

“I meant it.”

“Oh.” There was silence, and for several long moments, Crowley didn’t know which of them would have the nerve to leave the room first. When Aziraphale finally spoke, his voice was smaller than Crowley liked to hear it, with none of his usual guileless enthusiasm or affected indignation. “Me too.”

The room froze over. Or Crowley’s blood stopped moving. Or hell had come for him at last, but he didn’t know what to do. He sat. He thought (uselessly; no coherent thoughts appeared). He wondered if, perhaps, this was what is was to drown. There was a pressure on his chest and limbs, a rushing noise in his ears, and he could not, suddenly, remember what one was meant to do with a tongue, or fingers, lungs, the assorted other joints and muscles that some mad designer had imposed on humanity in a moment of reckless, frenzied innovation.

“Good,” was all he managed.

After another silence, Aziraphale spoke again. “So, what now? After all this? Where to?” his voice was high and hollow, reaching for levity and finding only a jarring rhythm, the echo of a march played badly.

Crowley stood. “It’s late. I should go.”

“Please stay.” Aziraphale reached to catch his sleeve and somehow, improbably, missed.

“Oh, well done.” Crowley’s face, above him, was inscrutable in the lamplight. More so, perhaps, than usual. The angel clicked his tongue and reached for Crowley’s hand. And missed. Again.

“What are you doing, angel? Flapping around like an injured bird.”

Aziraphale stood and reached suddenly for Crowley’s face. Crowley stepped back, startled, wary, and Aziraphale paused. He held up his hand as if to placate, and then reached slowly for Crowley’s shoulder.

He did not make contact. He _could_ not make contact. His hand went right through Crowley’s arm, and Crowley shivered.

They stared at each other, wary, confused, each separately calculating a next move. Crowley, tasting desperation on the air (it might have been his, but it was probably the angel’s. Probably) reached to take Aziraphale’s hand and found he could not do so. He stepped backward, and his feet, as usual, made contact with the floor, carried him several paces away from the sofa and Aziraphale and whatever the hell was going on in the room. Aziraphale followed, seemingly as solid as ever, tripping hard enough against a side table that he upset the lamp and plunged the room into darkness.

Crowley was fleeing, at a loss for anything else to do, unperturbed by the darkness, when Aziraphale made a shocked noise behind him. He turned, thinking that the angel had been injured or was somehow disintegrating further, only to see him standing next to the sofa and _beaming_.

Crowley threw up a hand to protect his eyes from whatever was currently happening, but stopped when he saw what Aziraphale was gazing at. Crowley, too, was glowing. “What the fuck?” he whispered, more to himself than anything. His hand was a bluish green, and when he looked down at himself the glow was everywhere.

“Language,” tutted Aziraphale automatically, not moving his gaze, even when Crowley grunted in disgust. “ _Darling_ ,” which was something Crowley had never been called before. “You’re…phosphorescing.”

“Luminescing,” corrected Crowley, only half-listening, staring at his own hands. “Living things don’t phosphoresce.”

The light changed as Aziraphale approached him, a pool of white encroaching on the edges of his green. Crowley met his eyes, seeing none of the alarm that raced like a jackrabbit in his chest reflected on this angel’s face. He could not immediately identify the expression. It wasn’t one he was used to seeing.

Wonder.

Aziraphale gazed at Crowley with wonder, approaching something close to awe. There was no fear in his eyes, no pain, no concern. He stared at Crowley as if he were a thing of beauty.

It took everything that Crowley had not to back away as Aziraphale approached. His light was so bright, his face so perfect, that Crowley was worried about marring him. He could hardly bear the brightness of Aziraphale’s shining, and if proximity to Crowley did not dull him (it did not), then surely when he got close enough the demon would be destroyed, burned away like an ant under a magnifying glass. But Aziraphale did not stop when he was within reach, and Crowley did not look away. If this was to be his end, if he was to be ignited and consumed by his angel’s love, he could think of no better way to die.

Aziraphale took one tiny step closer and then stopped walking, and he reached for Crowley’s still-raised hand. They did not touch, but seemed to occupy the same point in space, their two lights mingling into something so inarticulately beautiful that Crowley’s brain stuttered to a halt. He was all feeling now, no sense, and when Aziraphale raised his other hand to meet Crowley’s and they again subsumed one another, Crowley gasped.

He could _taste_ the angel’s joy on the back of his tongue. He could hear a second heartbeat pumping blood through his ears, out of time with his own. He could smell wine, leather, linen, the sweat and heat from their dalliance on the sofa.

He closed his eyes as Aziraphale stepped forward, still looking at him, until there was no distance between them. Lungs, useless (helpful) strained against his. He knew, suddenly, the taste of his own sweat, his own skin, knew what his dips and curves and points felt like beneath Aziraphale’s fingers.

Aziraphale groaned, or gasped, or swore- sound was practically meaningless now- and Crowley opened his eyes in startled instinct.

He saw stars. All of them.

Behind his eyes, or beneath his tongue, somewhere in the pit of his stomach or at the very tips of his toes, he could hear Aziraphale, still gasping. Crowley redirected his attention, somehow, to the angel. Crowley reached for him, in some undefinable way, and Aziraphale reached back with hands and thoughts and a dream he had once had, of the two of them, stargazing.

Aziraphale smelled like joy and lilacs and love and _wanting_. If Crowley had been conscious of having a chest, he knew that it was there that the knowledge of the angel’s love for him had taken up residence. He had known it abstractly, of course, for decades, but the physical sensation of Aziraphale’s love, warm and steady like a well-banked fire, was new to him. Newer still was the urge he could feel in the ends of their fingers and behind their sternums, an aching, all-consuming want, that smelled like stepping outside before sunrise on a cold day. It was a feeling of absence, of discomfort, a longing for safety and warm air. Crowley knew this feeling well, the feeling of slimy mud against his belly, of puddles, of long, cold distances, and to see it answered in the angel was absurd. No one wanted him like that, no one _could_. And yet-

And yet as soon as the thought formed, Aziraphale chided it away, sweeping it out of Crowley’s mind with a soft, warm hand and a sound like harp strings. Aziraphale smelled of laughter, tasted of comfort, sounded like love, and Crowley basked in it, snake-like and giddy with sensation, with _emotion_.

He heard Aziraphale smile, knew that his companion (his lover!) was sunning himself on the rock of Crowley’s love for him, was hearing the joy that Crowley somehow breathed out like smoke rings, foreign and ethereal. He would have grinned if he could, and felt Aziraphale answer in kind, but knew on the edges of his perception that the angel was up to something. He tried to formulate a question, but the angel beat him to it, doing something transcendent and carnal in Crowley’s core, and Crowley _burned_.

He was a conflagration. He was drowning, and he had no way of knowing if Aziraphale was the ocean or the life raft. He didn’t care. Crowley needed him, whatever he was. Needed the angel to never stop touching him, needed him to fill his lungs and to smile as wide and humbling as the night sky, needed him to whisper Crowley’s name like a prayer, a song, a gift.

Crowley knew, somehow, that this was the moment of his death. There was no way past this. He could feel Aziraphale within him and about him and it was so, so close to being too much. He knew the continued heat of Aziraphale’s love, his desire, the happiness that overwhelmed the angel at this moment was going to cook his brain. He was powerless to stop it, but he held on.

He held on because he wanted to hold up his end of the bargain. He wanted to make it clear, wanted Aziraphale to know the depth and breadth and magnitude of the feeling he carried with him. He needed, badly, to make Aziraphale understand that the world would be grey and soundless without him, that he was Crowley’s anchor and his air and the ground he walked on. Crowley knew it was vile and possessive, but he wanted to mark the angel as his own. He wanted to bite and scratch and stain Aziraphale so the other would carry a physical, indelible reminder of the love that suffocated and suffused him in the angel’s presence.

Aziraphale convulsed, or made a decadent, filthy noise, or stared at Crowley or gripped him tighter. Crowley gasped as the angel accepted what he offered up on whatever altar this was they stood at, gasped again as Aziraphale returned it to him, brighter and heavier, but smaller- a tiny, infinite weight, a miniscule black hole of love and want that would certainly consume him. The void settled in his chest as Aziraphale moaned or whispered his name over and over again, and Crowley responded in kind.

They were on the verge of some precipice and Crowley, sensing the abyss, gave up.

He fell, for the last time, for forever, did the thing he was best at. But this was different. He surrendered, releasing the knowledge of sensation, of atoms, of – once again- the light that burned him inside and out. And he knew, somehow, at the center of his consciousness and without a doubt, that Aziraphale was with him. They fell simultaneously, no longer entangled only because there was nothing left of them, no threads remained to snarl.

Crowley didn’t have a tongue, or lungs, or knowledge of words, but didn’t stop him from saying Aziraphale’s name, and from knowing when Aziraphale said his.

The came back to themselves, and each other, in the dark bookshop at the same moment. An obscene noise ripped itself from Crowley’s throat in the same instant that Aziraphale managed a breathy, wordless cry. They were locked together in an embrace, and as soon as they were aware that they had legs they forgot how to use them. They collapsed together to the carpet, gasping.

Crowley sat up as soon as he was able, eyes wide and straining in the darkness. Aziraphale was silhouetted on the ground next to him, lying on his back, chest heaving as if-. Crowley blinked. His skin felt electric, oversensitized, paper-thin. His clothes chafed, and the air Aziraphale was breathing settled warm and luminous in his chest. Suddenly all he wanted was a cuddle.

As soon as he decided to lie next to the angel on the floor, Aziraphale extended an arm and beckoned wordlessly. Crowley lay across his chest, Aziraphale’s arm around him, confused and somehow sated.

Aziraphale reached up to stroke his cheek and Crowley flinched at the contact. “Sorry,” he muttered, voice startlingly raw and hoarse. “Sensitive.”

Aziraphale hummed in agreement and moved his hand to Crowley’s still-clothed shoulder, tugging him into an embrace. He pressed his mouth to Crowley’s hair and sighed with unmistakable satisfaction. Crowley giggled.

“What?” croaked Aziraphale indignantly.

“It’s just-,” Crowley took a breath, steadied himself, and marveled at the miracle of human lungs. “I bought you dinner. We saved the world, I bought you dinner, I was hoping to get laid. Properly laid, not like last night, and instead-” He gestured helplessly- the wine, the broken lamp, the two of them on the floor, disheveled and half-dressed and spent.

“Well,” Aziraphale paused, thought, continued. “No cleanup.”

That tipped Crowley over the edge and into a full-blown belly laugh. “You’re right, I’ll give you that. What was that, though? Wasn’t sex.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Nah. Sex is messy. Smells funny. More scratching.”

“I’ve never once scratched you!”

They lapsed into silence, content. Crowley nestled closer. “Perhaps we were making love,” suggested Aziraphale, staring resolutely into the dark, in the direction of the ceiling.

“Do we not usually?” Crowley disengaged from the embrace and propped himself on an elbow.

“I mean, we fuck.” Crowley giggled at that word coming from the angel’s mouth again. “But I hardly think it’s the same thing.”

“It obviously isn’t,” responded Crowley. “But I’ve been making love to you my whole life, angel. In one way or another.”

He could see, barely, Aziraphale move his head to stare at him in the darkness. “I didn’t know.”

Crowley shrugged. “I didn’t tell you.”

“Well, you’ve told me. And now I know.” Aziraphale did not look away, and Crowley could almost make out his wide, bright eyes. “Perhaps that’s the difference.”

“Could be,” Crowley allowed, his voice level, and said nothing more.

Aziraphale did not break the silence, but he did tug Crowley towards himself and into a messy kiss, all tongue and enthusiasm. Crowley obliged, carding a hand through the angel’s hair, and not letting go even after they separated.

“I love you.” Aziraphale’s voice was serious, weighty. “I’m sorry about before. I didn’t-”

Crowley cut him off with another kiss- gentle, undemanding. “And now? Are you ready now?”

Aziraphale shrugged helplessly. “Yes? After everything that’s happened, after tonight, I don’t see how we can go back.”

“Do you want to? Go back?”

“No.” He tugged Crowley close again, face against Crowley’s shoulder and fingers gripping the shirt that hung loose across his back. “No, never. Not for the world.”

Crowley tipped him over and then rolled him into a long, steamy kiss. “Good. Nor I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I occupy a small dark corner on [tumblr](https://notacomputerorasinger.tumblr.com/)
> 
> I also am learning to use [ ko-fi](https://www.ko-fi.com/adelecicc)
> 
> Sometimes I [ tweet](https://twitter.com/AdeleCicc)!

**Author's Note:**

> Uh, the TV show has me back on my bullshit and this just kind of... fell out? Of my brain? I have two or three more chapters lined up, soooooooo enjoy?


End file.
